The Lies We Told

by Diane Chamberlain

  “You were right.” Dorothea sounded so tired. “One of the churches is having a memorial service tomorrow night for the storm victims,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck. “I think Maya and the nurse and pilot need special mention. I’ll do it, if you like.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” Adam said. “Unless you want to, Bec.”

  She should be the one to do it, but she would need months, maybe years, to sort through her feelings and come up with what to say about her sister. She shook her head. “I don’t think I can.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “You’d be fine,” he said. “But I’d like to do it. You can tell me if there’s something you’d like me to say. It can be a statement from both of us.”

  “I’ll leave you two to work this out.” Dorothea shoved her hands into her pockets. “The service is at seven, and a van’ll pick us up by my trailer.” She glanced at Rebecca. “You get some sleep, babe,” she said. “You sound like you’ve got the crud that’s going around. And, Adam, take the day off.”

  “I’ll be in later.” Adam got to his feet and walked Dorothea to the door. Rebecca didn’t move from her perch on the edge of the bed, one shoe off, the other unlaced. She heard Adam whisper “…not going to leave her alone,” and she was glad. She didn’t think she could handle being alone just then. She’d lost more than her sister in these two weeks. She’d lost her fire. Her steel. At times, when she imagined babies in her arms or her parents on the bleachers, she wondered if she was also losing her sanity.

  She took off her other shoe and lay down on the bed, but instantly sat up again. “I can’t breathe when I lie down,” she said to Adam. “My nose is too stuffy.”

  Adam took his own pillow from the couch and propped it up on top of hers at the head of the bed. “Try sleeping sitting up partway.”

  “I’m going to get your pillow all germy,” she said.

  “Like I care.” He went into the bathroom, and she heard the water running. When he came out, he had one of their thin white washcloths in his hands. He’d wet it and folded it into a rectangle, and he rested it on her forehead. He was so gentle. She was glad now that Maya had had his caring as long as she did.

  He sat on the edge of her bed as she tried to get comfortable. She could breathe if she lay on her right side, propped up by the pillows, though she had to hold the washcloth against her forehead so it didn’t fall. Her back was to Adam, and for a long time, neither of them spoke.

  “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

  He didn’t answer right away. “It’s not like this was unexpected,” he said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You can go to the clinic,” she said, although she didn’t want him to leave. “I’m just going to sleep.”

  “I don’t want to go,” he said. “Not yet.”

  Her eyes were closed, and Maya’s face was on the inside of her eyelids. She blinked but couldn’t get rid of the image. Maya was smiling. She didn’t look like a woman who’d suffered many losses, but she had and it wasn’t fair.

  “It’s never enough,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “What is?”

  “You can never get enough of somebody you love,” she said. It’s like…I wish I had been with her every single day. Every minute of every day.”

  “I know.” He rubbed her shoulder.

  “She’s on the inside of my eyelids.”

  He laughed. “Mine, too.”

  “Really? She’s smiling. Is she smiling on the inside of your eyelids?”

  He hesitated. “Yes,” he said, in a way that made Rebecca doubt his honesty.

  “I wish I’d talked to her every day, the way some sisters do. We should have. But I was always away someplace without cell coverage.” She hadn’t been the best sister. “If I could have her back, I’d do that. Talk to her every day.”

  “There’s something I want, Rebecca,” he said abruptly.

  She thought he meant something tangible. Did she have something of Maya’s he wanted? A keepsake. “What?” she asked.

  “I want you to always be my family.” His voice was husky. “We might not technically be in-laws any longer, but I want us to stay family forever. Okay?”

  She rolled onto her back, her head pounding and stuffed with cotton, and said, “Maya wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  He nodded, leaning forward to turn the damp washcloth over on her forehead, and when she shut her eyes again, she could have sworn Maya’s smile grew wider.

  36

  Maya

  I’D BEEN AT LAST RUN SHELTER AT LEAST TEN DAYS. PROBABLY longer. I could tell from the way the skin itched and drew tight around the stitches on my shin. It was time—past time—for those stitches to come out.

  “Do you have any little scissors or a razor blade?” I asked Simmee. We were washing the inside of the living room windows. Simmee’d noticed a smudge on one of them an hour earlier, and she was off on a tear, mixing vinegar and water and starting to scrub, her belly so big she could barely get close enough to the windows to clean them. “My stitches are ready to come out,” I said.

  “Lady Alice’ll do it.” She worked her rag into a corner of one of the panes. The sharp smell of vinegar filled the room. “I ain’t got nothing little enough you can use.”

  I sighed quietly, not wanting her to hear. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go over there when we’re done.” I thought of walking through the woods alone and looked at the wall by the front door. One of the guns was gone. Tully was out there, ready to mistake me for a deer. “You want to come with me?” I asked.

  “You okay goin’ by yourself?” She glanced at me. “My back’s givin’ me fits today.”

  “Sure, I’ll be fine,” I lied. Maybe I should put it off. Maybe Simmee would be up to it tomorrow. It wasn’t that far to Lady Alice’s, though, and I was being ridiculous. “Why don’t you sit down and let me finish the windows?” I said.

  For a minute, I thought she’d agree, but she shook her head. “I like doin’ this,” she said. “I like doin’ a task you can see the outcome quick, like this. That’s why I like cleanin’. I think about what I’m doin’. I think about this here glass, how it was made and everything.” She stood back and studied the window she was cleaning, moving her head from side to side, checking for streaks. “I do that every single time I clean a window. Keeps me from thinkin’ about other things.”

  She had a better attitude than I did about housework, that was for certain. My mind was anyplace but on the window I was cleaning. My mind was on her. She’d been so light and sunny when I’d arrived at Last Run, and now seemed dark and weighed down. I wanted to lift that darkness, but was coming to think it would have to lift on its own. It would disappear when the baby came, I was sure. This was a frightening time for her—waiting for labor and delivery, her mother’s fate hanging over her head.

  For hours after I turned down the offer of her baby, Simmee wouldn’t speak to me. I finally sat her down, my hands firmly on her shoulders, and told her I would help her any way I could, short of taking her baby. I told her how honored I was that she trusted me to raise her child, but that it was her hormones talking and that she shouldn’t make any irrevocable decisions now. I would make sure a visiting nurse came out to check on her and the baby. I would send her money, if that’s what she needed.

  She listened to me, and I thought she truly understood what I was saying because she finally nodded and said, “You’re probably right.” Yet for another day, there was a new tension between us that saddened me. Only now did it seem to be lifting.

  Things seemed to have settled down between Tully and me as well, after our rocky conversation by the fire pit and my ridiculous rush to get into the house and away from his rifle. At supper that night, he acted as though nothing had passed between us, telling off-color jokes and leaning over to nuzzle Simmee’s neck, and I joined him in the pretense. I felt confused about my role. He was certainly right that I was an ou
tsider, better educated, with values honed in a world where money was of little concern and where what was best for people seemed perfectly clear. Who was I to push my values on people who didn’t live in my world? Yet Simmee’s anxiety gnawed at me. She wanted something from me, something I couldn’t give her.

  When we finished the windows, I set out for Lady Alice’s. I was a wreck walking through the gloomy woods, with their tangled vines that caught at my feet and arms and neck. The woods had seemed spooky enough to me when I’d walked through them with Simmee. Alone, I found them utterly unnerving. Every sound—squirrels rustling in the leaves, the snap of a twig—made me jump, and I nearly ran the last half of the path to Lady Alice’s. I was overjoyed to see her small run-down shack come into view. A clothesline hung between the corner of the house and a nearby tree, and Lady Alice’s black outfit was pinned to the line. I wondered what she’d be wearing. I couldn’t picture her in anything other than black.

  A bright blue tarp now covered the hole in the porch roof, and the branch that had nearly filled the porch now lay on the ground nearby. Tully, I thought, touched as I imagined him struggling to get that branch out of Lady Alice’s porch.

  Lady Alice must have seen me approaching the house, because she already had the screen door open for me when I stepped onto the porch.

  “Hello!” she said. She wore a long-sleeved cotton dress, tiny pink and green daisies dotting a purple background.

  “You look lovely.” I smiled, intentionally ignoring the filigreed boot cleaner by the door. It was easy to smile now that I was out of the woods. I was already dreading the walk back.

  “Oh, just don’t look at me.” She brushed away the compliment with a wave of her hand. “I don’t feel right in this dress with Jackson gone, but today’s washin’ day.”

  “Well, I was hoping it could also be ‘take Maya’s stitches out’ day,” I said. “Do you have time?”

  “Sure ’nuff,” she said. “Can always make time for you, Miss Maya.”

  I followed her through her house toward the kitchen. The living room was dark as we passed through it, and I could barely see all the quilts and doilies as my eyes tried to adjust to the lack of light. In the kitchen, Lady Alice picked up a worn leather bag, exactly like those old bags doctors used in the days of house calls. She smiled at me as she lifted it from the counter. “My medical kit,” she said with some pride. I suddenly pictured her trying to save Jackson when Tully brought him to her after his accident. Had he already been dead then, or had he died in her arms despite her ministrations? I didn’t want to think about it.

  Lady Alice opened the bag and, with a reverential air, took out a lidded plastic container. She lifted the lid to reveal a green bar of soap, and I remembered Simmee telling me something about the “special soap” Lady Alice used when she treated her patients.

  I watched as she scrubbed her hands carefully in the sink. The soap gave off a strong, piney scent. Irish Spring, I thought to myself with a smile. Her special soap.

  “We’ll go out to the back stoop,” she said, turning off the faucet with her scrubbed fingertips. “Light’ll be best out there.”

  I followed her out the back door, and we arranged ourselves on the wooden steps. I leaned against the house, rolled up the leg of my uniform pants and let Lady Alice lift my leg on her lap. I suddenly remembered a day long ago when Daddy had held my leg in his lap to pluck gravel from my skinned knee. It had hurt like the devil, but I didn’t cry. “You’re my brave girl,” he’d said. I had been brave once upon a time. Could you recapture something like that? Could I walk through the woods without jumping at every sound?

  I looked down at my leg stretched across Lady Alice’s thighs. A couple of weeks’ growth of leg hair caught the dappled sunlight. The hair was very blond, but still a revolting sight. I hadn’t seen hair on my legs since I’d started shaving when I was twelve.

  Lady Alice opened her bag again and pulled out tweezers and a pair of genuine suture scissors.

  “Where did you get your medical supplies?” I asked.

  “My uncle Jimmy was a doctor,” she said. “He’d come ’round from time to time. When he died, he left me this here bag in his will. I reckon he saw the most promise in me, his own children bein’—” she gave me a conspiratorial glance “—soft in the head.”

  I laughed. Her clean hands had now touched everything: the bag, my leg, the wooden step, her dress, the scissors. I thought of asking her to at least boil the scissors first, but then let the question drift out of my mind. What the hell, I thought. The wound was closed and clean. I’d survive.

  She used the tweezers and scissors expertly and, despite my initial misgivings, I was impressed. “You’re good at this,” I said.

  “Oh, nothin’ to it.” She snipped and tugged. Snipped and tugged. Cleaned a bit of dried blood from my skin with gauze and alcohol. “Been doin’ it so long, I can’t remember when I didn’t know how.”

  “I was glad to see that Tully’s working on your porch,” I said.

  “Oh, Larry done the most of it.”

  “Larry?” Her head was lowered over my leg, her voice muffled, and I thought I’d heard her wrong.

  “Yes’m. He come yesterday mornin’. Brung me groceries and tried to git me to go back with him, but I told him ain’t no way I’m leavin’.” She chuckled. “Which is what I always tell him. He’d fall out if I said I was comin’. Maybe one of these days that’s what I’ll say jest to see what—”

  “Larry?” Every muscle in my body tensed. “Your son, Larry? He was here yesterday?”

  “Yes’m, he sure was.”

  “But…did you tell him about me? I thought you knew I need to go home! I thought you knew—”

  “What you gettin’ all fired up about?” she asked. “Hold this here leg still, now, or I’ll end up snippin’ somethin’ we don’t want snipped.”

  “Lady Alice!” I removed my leg from her lap with half the stitches still intact. Leaning forward, I grabbed her arm. “Why didn’t you say anything to him about me needing to get home?”

  “Why you so upset?” She backed away from me a little, confusion in her eyes. “Tully was here helpin’ him with the roof, ’n’ he didn’t say nothin’, so I figgered you musta changed—”

  “Tully was here? At the same time as Larry?”

  “That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you, child.” She smoothed a hand over my cheek. “Tully didn’t say nothin’ ’bout you, and I figgered you made up your mind to stay and help me birth Simmee’s baby, you bein’ so close to her now and all.”

  I filled with rage. “How dare he!” I shouted. “He’s keeping me a prisoner!” I stood up, running my hands through my snarled hair. “I need to go home, Lady Alice!” I said. “I have a husband and sister who probably think I’m dead. They don’t know what happened to me!”

  Lady Alice got to her feet and pulled me into a hug. I felt her coarse hair beneath my chin, and the scent of Irish Spring filled my nostrils. “It’s gonna be all right, child,” she said. “You safe here. Larry’ll come ’round again and we’ll straighten it out next time. Tully just mistook what you said, that’s all.”

  “I never said anything to make him think I wanted to stay!” I’d started to cry. My body convulsed with my tears, and she tried to hold me even tighter, but I pulled away, far too upset to be consoled. I struggled to replay my conversation with Tully over in my mind. Had I said something that would lead him to believe I wanted to stay for the birth of the baby? Absolutely not. No way.

  Suddenly I remembered the boat and nearly laughed with relief. “He must have told Larry about the boat washing away!” I said. “He probably told him to bring us—Tully and Simmee—another boat, and then they’ll take me out of here.” Even as I spoke, I knew my reasoning didn’t make sense. Why didn’t he simply ask Larry to take me? And why didn’t Tully tell me if that was his plan? “Did Tully at least ask Larry to call my family, or—” I stopped myself. Of course not. Tully would have no idea how to
get in touch with Adam or Rebecca. “This is…this is unbelievable!”

  “Sit down, Miss Maya.” Lady Alice’s voice was suddenly strident, so much so that I took my seat again on the step.

  I looked up at her. “I can’t believe he didn’t say anything to Larry,” I said. “I just can’t believe it.”

  She sat next to me again. “Now why do you think he’d keep it to hisself?” she asked.

  “I don’t really care. All I care about is—”

  “You think ’bout it. Think why that man want to keep you here.”

  Ransom? I wondered. Have I been kidnapped? Would he try to get money from Adam? But even as that thought spun through my mind, I knew it was ridiculous.

  “He wants you to birth Simmee’s baby.” Lady Alice spoke slowly, as though I was one of her soft-in-the-head cousins. “You. A real doctor. I’m a old woman, ’n’ it’s prolly got him tied up in worry.” She waved her hands through the air. “I’m no fool, Miss Maya. I know that girl’s scared silly same thing’s gonna happen to her what happened to her mama. Tully’s jest as scared. So it’s good you here. Everbody wants you here.”

  “But I don’t want to be here,” I snapped. “I want to go home.”

  “I know you do, child. I’m sorry I didn’t say somethin’ to Larry myself. I was…” She looked into the woods, gnawing at her lip, and I thought I saw genuine regret in the set of her features. “I feel right bad,” she said. “I was jest thinkin’ ’bout myself and how glad I was t’ see Larry and get some food in the house.” She took my hand in her tiny one and held it on her knee. “Truth is, Miss Maya, I don’t know why Tully didn’t say nothin’,” she admitted. “If it got to do with Simmee and the baby, then you ain’t got long to worry. That girl ready to pop.”

  I let go of her hand. “I need to talk to Tully,” I said, getting to my feet again, but she caught my arm.

  “Maybe you don’t want to bother him with this,” she said. It sounded like a warning.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, let me finish them stitches.” She reached toward my leg. “Then you free to go tear into that man, if you like. But think about Simmee. Think about how good it’ll be for her to have you here when that baby come.”